Nola M. Stephens

I'm a fifth-year PhD student in the Linguistics Department at Stanford University. I grew up in Pottsboro, Texas with my older brother and a nice collection of double modals. My grandparents still run a hamburger place in Pottsboro. If you're ever in the area, you might can get some lunch there. As my brother once wrote, "Coming in is coming home."

Along with linguistics proper, I have a healthy appreciation for the written word. When I was a toddler, my mother read me her term papers as bedtime stories (or so I've been told). Perhaps this explains my eager preoccupation with both academic writing and children's literature. It's a nice duo, but I suspect the merger hasn't quite reached its full potential. I am also endlessly charmed by haiku, but the source of this fancy eludes me.

Research interests:

My primary research interests are in first language acquisition, information structure, argument structure, syntax, lexical semantics, and psycholinguistics. My dissertation research considers the effects of discourse status on argument structure in the language of children ages 3-5. In particular, I'm studying the effects of givenness on the two postverbal arguments of the English dative and locative alternations, and I'm finding that children, like adults, tend to use given-before-new word order. I'm hoping to better understand the mechanisms (e.g. processing, communicative pressure, statistical learning) that underlie these effects.

Translation for the interested non-linguist:

I'm studying how previous conversation influences the way children describe events. If a child sees a woman give a hat to a man, would the child be more likely to say "she gave the man the hat" or "she gave the hat to the man"? I find that preschool children tend to use the first type of sentence if the man was just mentioned, and the second type if the hat was just mentioned. In other words, the entity that was mentioned in previous conversation (the "given information") comes before the one that hasn't yet been mentioned (the "new information"). This is the same pattern found in adult language. I want to know whether children use word order like this because it's easier for them, or because they think it's easier for the listener, or because they learn it from listening to adults speak, or some combination of these factors.

Links:

• My email address: nola at stanford dot edu
• My work address: Department of Linguistics, Stanford Univeristy
• A few reasons I ended up in grad school studying linguistics: Prof. Daniel Dinnsen, Prof. Natsuko Tsujimura, Prof. Henry Higgins
• Places that have given me a student ID: Stanford University, Indiana University, Albert-Ludwigs-Universitaet Freiburg, Durant High School
• My family on-line: my mom, my step-dad, my brother, my brother's blog, my cousin's art
• My favorite fair trade organization: Trade as One